by Christina Miller, @CLMillerbooks

Sometimes both our flowers and our books just need a good pruning.

This fall, the church ladies decided to pull out all the old landscaping and replace it with beautiful new white hydrangeas, yellow mums, and boxwood. So last Saturday, we dug up leggy azaleas, overgrown ferns, and half-dead holly bushes. Then we set our fresh new plants in the ground and gave them a good drink. 

Yesterday, we found hydrangea leaves on the ground and black spots all over the few leaves that hadn’t fallen. I paid a visit to my friend who owns the nursery where I’d bought the plants. 

“They’re in shock,” Aaron said and prescribed an insane amount of watering. “All the flowers and bad leaves have to go. Otherwise, they’re going to die.”

The beautiful white hydrangea blooms? I couldn’t bear to cut them off, as pretty as they looked. Especially considering the contrast between them and the tired, overgrown mess they’d replaced. I’d just head back to church and leave the bushes as they were.

My expression must have betrayed my shock (and maybe my stubbornness and unwillingness to listen to him), because Aaron took me to the back side of the property and showed me two rose bushes sitting side by side in their pots. One was compact and lush and covered with pink roses. The other was tall and lanky and had only three small blossoms.

“Last spring, I told one of my employees to prune these bushes,” he said. “He didn’t want to do it because the roses had started to bloom. So we did an experiment. We pruned one and left the other alone.” He pointed to the bushes. “Which do you think we pruned?”

 I didn’t want to admit it, but I knew the beautiful bush was the one he’d trimmed. I called my landscaping team and told them we needed to prune the hydrangeas.

After helping to pull black-spotted leaves off eight plants (we’re waiting to cut off the flowers until after the weekend so we can have one Sunday service with blooms), I decided to work on another pruning project. 

I pulled up a manuscript that has sat on my computer for more years than I like to admit. I’d promised a revised version to a publisher at a recent conference, not realizing how little I’d actually known about writing fiction back when I attempted this 103,000-word historical romance.

I blew off the dust (metaphorically speaking) and examined each page. (Did you know that the pages of a book were once called its leaves?) I found wordiness, a subplot that kept the hero and heroine apart for almost half the book, and so much snarky dialogue and attitude from the heroine that even I didn’t like her. 

Then I discovered this manuscript didn’t have a romance arc, a compelling opening, emotional depth, or a midpoint change. It didn’t have a hook to make it stand out from any other proposal that would land on the editor’s desk. The story also had an abundance of plot holes and underdeveloped plot points, among other fatal flaws. 

It was as if black-spotted, dried-up leaves lay all over the book’s pages.

But the story had a strong basic plot, an interesting setting and era, and a likeable hero, so I got to work. Soon, I realized that correcting all the faulty elements in this book would add tens of thousands of words to the big 103,000-word manuscript. 

The time to prune had arrived.

I started by trimming several thousand unnecessary words. The book looked a little better already.

Then I hacked out the giant, 20,000-word subplot. This hurt because it included a setting change that put the heroine in an interesting city. It also meant I had to cut two quirky, fun characters. But they had to go for the sake of the story, just as those beautiful white hydrangea flowers are going to have to go after the weekend service. And as with the plants, I knew the pruning would eventually make the writing more beautiful. 

Once I hit delete on the subplot, the story felt lighter, more manageable. Next problem: chapter one.

I always start my books in the hero’s POV. But since the title is named after the heroine, and because my new proposal includes two other stories about women working in espionage, this one needed to start in Eva’s POV. Cutting the original first scene didn’t sting quite as much as cutting the subplot. Maybe that was because I was getting more used to the pruning and its positive results.

Next, I had to eliminate the heroine’s negative personality traits. Now, I’m not talking about the flaw each main character must have. I’m talking about an overload of sarcasm and bossiness that made me wonder why the charming hero ever fell in love with her. In my defense, when I wrote this story many years ago, everyone wanted sassy heroines. But my early-writing-days attempt at sassiness had fallen flat. These words, like the black hydrangea leaves, were easy to snip.

Now, with the contract-killing elements all pruned from this once-overgrown, messy manuscript, I get to add the missing romance arc, strong emotions, and a brave, determined, sweet heroine for the hero to fall in love with. And in time, I hope this book will have as much lushness, strength, and beauty as our healthy hydrangeas will have next spring.

What about you? Have you ever needed to prune contract-killing sections of your book? What was the result?

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Embracing His Past

Stunned to learn he has an adult son, widower Harrison Mitchell’s eager to track him down and build a relationship. But when he uproots his life and moves to Natchez, Mississippi, he’s hit with another surprise: his new boss, Anise Armstrong, is his son’s adoptive mother. Now he must win her trust to prove he deserves to be a father and grandfather … and possibly a husband.

Author Christina Miller’s idea of a perfect day involves a southern beach, a stack of books, and a glass of sweet tea. Years ago, she left her job as an RN to work in the church her husband pastors. She also became a writer—and sometimes she gets to write on the beach. Christina is a Love Inspired author, Bethany Global University (Bloomington, Minnesota) graduate with degrees in theology and missiology, church secretary, worship leader, and children’s ministry teacher. She has owned and operated Mentor’s Pen Editorial Services (mentorspen@gmail.com) for the past fourteen years, specializing in fiction editing. Christina’s latest release, Embracing His Past, was a 2023 Carol Award finalist. Christina lives on her family farm with her husband of thirty-five years.